Samuel Florman - The Aftermath

For both her authorized and unauthorized work, Sarah was destined to gain universal approval. She had taken the initiative with the first notes of “Colonel Bogie’s March” and never looked back.

“How the hell did you have the nerve to pull this off?” Wil asked Sarah later in the day.

“I didn’t have the nerve to sit by and do nothing,” she answered. “I keep telling you, but you don’t seem to listen. Man does not live by bread alone.”

“Yes, yes, but what I’m saying—what our community planners are saying—is ‘first things first.’ We’re engaged in a life and death struggle here. It seems to be our fate…”

Sarah kissed him lightly on the cheek, as if he were a child who would some day grow up and understand. “Ah yes, fate,” she said in a husky voice. “That’s it exactly. As Andre Malraux said: ‘All art is a revolt against man’s fate.’ “

“Your quotable intellectuals seem to have an answer for everything.”

“Nobody has all the answers, darling, least of all your Coordinating Committee and Joint-Planning-everybody’s-life-from-now-on-Subcommittee. I’m not making fun, Wil, just pointing out the absurdity and fragility of it all. Leaven your technical fix with a touch of art and philosophy and you improve our chances for survival—for true survival, a survival in the full sense of the word.”

On the faraway shore of Queen Ranavolana’s island kingdom, the pirate sovereign gathered her government councilors and subcommanders in her newly erected “palace.” A compound had been constructed to house Her Highness and Majesty, the voice and arm of Holy Zanahary, the instrument of the Creator and the Sacred Ancestors.

The seagoing pirates had returned from their confrontation with the English-speaking survivors unsure what the next step was going to be. Their booty, although not a great prize in any traditional sense, was welcome to comrades who were making do with the most meager rations. And they raised the group’s spirits with highly embellished stories of conquest on the high seas. Fellow Malagasy survivors laughed and gasped upon hearing the tales of derring-do.

The young woman who had assumed the title and role of queen, although outwardly high-spirited, was actually in a pensive mood. She had begun to calculate the potential risks and rewards of an attack on the strangers she and her men had encountered. Depending upon who they were and how many, and whether or not they had established an adequate defense against invasion, they might provide an ideal target for a successful raid—a raid that could help establish her newly founded Kingdom. The surviving population on Madagascar was a pathetic remnant that presented no threat.

And on the sea, aside from this one vessel of fishermen, she had encountered nothing but drifting wrecks. But those seven sailors, obviously based on the South African continent, represented a community whose strength was difficult to assess.

Despite the underlying fears and uncertainties, she felt as high on anticipation as she ever had on any drug. Adrenaline surged through her body. She only wished there were a way to fight the battle tonight, to draw blood, to’ see the fear in her “enemies’ “ eyes as she and her pirate company unleashed their own tsunami of violence and terror upon them.

Ranavolana—she was still getting used to the name—had surprised herself by how readily she took to leadership and military strategy. All those years, through college and her wandering times, she had always read books—Marcus Aurelius and Caesar, Sun-tzu and Mao Tse-tung. At her bedside now—it was a cot, really—she kept old paperbound copies of Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power and Machiavelli’s The Prince; and she perused them religiously. Since she was off drugs she retained more, absorbing the wisdom and practical advice of deep thinkers.

Altogether her pirate navy had so far collected twenty vessels of various sizes and conditions, including her own flagship, the sloop with the blood red sail. Tsunamis had cast numerous yachts up on the shores of Madagascar, along the south coast where the main body of the survivors were living, and some of the vessels had survived with little serious damage. They were there for the taking, which is what the queen’s people did, moving them downhill and into the water.

She divided her command among four experienced seamen, each with a lengthy resume as a career criminal (including prison time in virtually every South Asian port between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean). These men were both her subjects and her teachers in the ways of piracy. She respected and feared them, listened to their counsel and watched their every move.

The Indian, Raman Patel, was small in stature, and slight enough to be blown off deck in a strong wind; but his fierce black eyes revealed the hard character of a man who had sailed rough seas for forty of his forty-seven years. He was the son of an unknown sailor and a prostitute mother from Goa. His mother had tried to put a Christian imprint on her wild son; but he spent all his time at the docks watching and learning from men of the sea. When she died, he signed on as a mess boy on a British steamer. Within two years, he joined the crew of a pirate ship based in Zanzibar.

Yook Louie was a fifty-year-old Taiwan native, tall and lank as a board, with gray-yellow skin. His hair was stiff and steel gray, his brows black, and he grew a wispy goatee, rarely trimmed. He had once been married and was certain that he had fathered three or four children by his wife… now, in the aftermath of the Event, all certainly dead.

Jama Chaudri was a true mongrel, and he boasted of it: half Indian, part English, a little Chinese, perhaps as much as a quarter Indonesian, with an Arab or two and even an Irishman somewhere in his family tree—and he’d fight any man who mocked or criticized any of these racial or national groups. So, he was a skilled fighter, with fists or knives, and had by his own count killed at least twenty men. He was no mathematician, though, so the number—including those he had murdered in sea raids—was possibly double that. He had been a pirate for at least twenty-five years.

Then there was Errol Waddell, the big, ebullient Australian ex-con and “retired” bosun of Her Majesty’s Navy. Now in his fifties, with weathered brown skin and a shock of white-blond hair, he had seen service in the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, when his countrymen fought alongside the U.S. military services. He had spent a decade as a merchant seaman in the busy trade corridor between Singapore and Hong Kong. But he had been caught smuggling drugs and weapons into Sydney and spent another decade in national prison. The Event set him free.

Together, these four men were Queen Ranavolana’s senior command structure, her seagoing Praetorian Guard. They had, among them, more than a century of experience in piracy in the “dark alleys” of the seas east of Africa and south of Asia. They had little regard for human life—their victims’, their men’s, even their own—and in this weird new post-Event world, they were pledged to serve their pirate queen with all the skill and ferocity they could muster. They had absolutely nothing to lose, and thus were incredibly dangerous to everyone else.

The queen’s dilemma, then, was what to do with the resources at her disposal.

“We will send out a reconnaissance patrol to determine the enemy’s strength and ability to defend himself.” She announced this to her commanders matter-of-factly, and they received the information without visible reaction.

“Yer Highness,” said Waddell, the big Aussie, “I think that is exactly what we ought to do, but—er… well, I think we also should patrol to the east to see if there’s anyone, or anything, out that way.”